Painting Fakes

Apologies for my short absence.  I've been busy with work, it being the end of the financial year and all, and not much spare time to write down the thoughts clattering around my head.  Anyway, in between other things I've been gradually working my way through Eusebius' History of the Church.   Eusebius has been called the "father of church history" and this work, which first appeared early in the 4th century, is the earliest surviving attempt at a comprehensive account of the first three centuries of Christianity. I say "attempt" because the work is hardly comprehensive.  In the first place, it is almost entirely a history of the Greek-speaking church of the Eastern mediterranean, with occasional insertions of events from the West, especially Rome.  Yet for me this was the least puzzling thing about it.  As a 21st century reader it is easy to see what it lacks as a work of history. For a start there is no real sense of development....

Lately it seems that a lot of conversations I have come around to the subject of miracles, and in particular Jesus' miracles, so I thought I'd write a short series of posts on the subject. For a lot of my Christian friends, Jesus' miracles are one of the most important pieces of evidence of his divinity.  His miracles are seen as showing the power of God expressed through him, and vindicate his claim to divinity as well as the reality of God.  For them, without the miracles there is no Christianity. Paradoxically, these same miracles are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many of my atheist friends.  One of the reasons they reject religion in general and Christianity in particular is that they find the idea of miracles impossible to believe.  As Crossan and Reed say, impossibility battles with uniqueness.  Both parties accept that miracles are highly improbable and that it would take something extraordinarily special to make one hap...

So apparently the Queensland Government's budget is in crisis, and without drastic action we will all be ruined.  It must be so because Peter Costello says so. Soon after its election the new Queensland Government appointed Costello, long-serving treasurer in the Howard government, to head a commission of audit into the Queensland budget.  Its interim report suggests that the government needs to save 25 to 30 billion dollars over a five year period to regain its AAA credit rating from Standard and Poors. Should we believe them?  Well, I'm no economist but I have my doubts.  For a start, why did the government appoint a veteran Liberal politician, and one notorious for his fiscal conservatism and love of surpluses, instead of, say, a distinguished economist?  Why does new Queensland Treasurer Tim Nicholls look so much like Costello's little brother at the press conference to launch the report? Secondly, the report includes a set of forward estimates fr...

For my 50th birthday my in-laws gave me a copy of The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries , edited by Ian Pindar.  I've been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few months.  Like most anthologies it mixes the brilliant with the pedestrian.  Predictably there were articles about whether the Turin Shroud was real, whether Shakespeare really wrote his own plays, the identity of Jack the Ripper and the "real" story behind the murder of JFK.  Along with this were some surprises.  Who would have thought there was an actual historical event behind the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, or that the characters in The Three Musketeers were based on real people?  And I had certainly never heard of the fabulous Voynich Manuscript , a beautiful, elaborate book probably dating from the later 15th century written in a completely incomprehensible "language". Amidst all these gems and rocks are two little tales about the fall of imperial Russia.  The fir...

Twice in every 100-odd years, Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun.  For a few hours, if there are no clouds, earth-bound mortals can see her shadow as it crosses the face of the sun and then disappears.  It happened today amidst much fanfare and astronomical excitement. This means it's a good day for a post on Shirley Hazzard's wonderful novel, The Transit of Venus .  Expatriate Aussie novelist Hazzard is not prolific by any means but what her work lacks in quantity it makes up in quality and The Transit of Venus is her masterwork. Published in 1980, it follows the lives and loves of Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell from their arrival in the UK after World War 2.  It is a lyrical, elliptical novel, moments of sly humour mingled with an all-pervading sense of tragedy.  Her characterisation is beautifully nuanced, you feel passionate love or scorn for each of her creations. Venus remains hidden for long, dreary years, reveals h...

I know I promised to review some more recent Lives of Jesus and I've been doing that, but late last year I picked up a copy of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word in a second hand shop.  Since Bultmann has made a couple of cameos in these reviews, I thought I'd tell you a little more about what he says. Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926, and translated into English in 1934.  Bultmann had yet to embark on the project of "demythologising" Christianity which was to make him famous or notorious throughout the Christian world, depending on your viewpoint.  Here in this book we can see the beginnings of that theology and understand both its strength and its weakness. One thing this book shows is how little the study of the Gospels has changed over the past century.  Bultmann has a lot in common with the present day fellows of the Jesus Seminar .  Like them, he sees the Gospels as layered texts, some parts recording the actual wo...

Towards the end of last year I had a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Commonwealth Government's marketing of the Carbon Tax.  My problem was that they were marketing the tax as if it was a problem.  The purpose of the Carbon Tax - combating global warming by reducing carbon pollution - was hardly mentioned in their marketing materials.  Instead they majored on the details of compensation.  The government gave the impression that they were creating a problem, and then fixing it. Yesterday's mailbox reveals Stage 2 of this marketing strategy and now it's beginning to make more sense.  My local Labor MP Graham Perrett's Moreton Report lists, in huge bright letters, "6 ways our strong economy is working for Moreton."  These publications are of course approved by the government's marketing people, and Labor members around the country will be distributing newsletters with similar headlines. He lists "Schoolkids Bonus", "New $600 increa...

Last year I wrote a review of The Doors which for some reason is the most visited post on this blog, perhaps because it includes a couple of pictures of Jim Morrison.  Anyway, on the plane home from the Kimberleys I had a read of John Densmore's Riders on the Storm, published in 1990. For those who missed it, the Doors represent the dark side of the late 60s and early 70s.  Their songs portray a world of despair, confusion and nihilism far removed from the peace, love and harmony of Woodstock, where they refused an invitation to perform.  Their live performances, fuelled by singer Jim Morrison's erratic moods and alcohol addiction, were unpredictable and at times dangerous.  Their brief career ended in 1971 with Morrison's death, apparently from a heroin overdose, in a Paris hotel room. Densmore, the Doors' drummer, is so far the only member of the band to tell his story.  This may be because the story is not pleasant, and perhaps all of them are...

I'm going to stop banging on about the Kimberley after this, but I didn't want to finish on a down note in case you think that I went off to visit some sort of post-colonial dystopia.  There are some hard aspects to life on the Dampier Peninsula but wonderful people, a great place and a lot to like.  So instead I want to tell you about two things - cups and fishing. First of all, to paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, this is not a cup. THIS is a cup! People in the Dampier Peninsula communities do not drink small cups of tea.  If we stayed in a hotel, my local co-workers would despair because their rooms had thimble-like cups which would only just give you a taste.  Any cup of tea smaller than half a litre is not worth making. And then, of course, no conversation on the Dampier Peninsula is complete without some mention of fishing.  Of course they live by the sea, but more than that, they spend a lot of time on it.  Kids can handle boats before ...

Here's another snippet from the far north-west, this time about something a little closer to my normal field of knowledge - the Community Development Employment Program or CDEP.  This program was once the jewel in the crown of Aboriginal employment programs.  First trialled in 1977, by the early 2000s the program catered for over 40,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander job seekers. CDEP was basically a "work for the dole" program, introduced on Aboriginal communities at their own request long before there was any such thing in the mainstream social security system.  It allowed communities to convert unemployment benefits into wages and pay unemployed people to work on community projects.  An unemployment benefit is equivalent to a bit under half a full time wage for an unskilled worker, so participants were treated as having a part-time job, 16 hours a week.  It was a creative response to two pressing problems on those communities - extremely limited empl...

Well I'm back home in the cold country after three weeks on the Dampier Peninsula and surrounds.  Still a lot to think about and sort through, though. One of the things that really became clearer to me over my three weeks was the extent to which the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley are living in two worlds.  On the one hand, they are participating in the modern Western society and economy.  They wear European clothes (with a distinctive Aboriginal style!) and drive cars, they go to school and university or TAFE, hold down jobs, run businesses and manage large complex community organisations.  A lot of them are very successful at doing this.  One of my local co-workers, in his mid-30s, has half a university degree in marine biology, plus tickets in motor mechanics and construction, and has worked on a number of mine sites as well as in more mundane town jobs.  Others struggle - levels of unemployment are high, there's a lot of alcoholism and mental ill...

On Monday we paid a visit to Beagle Bay .  After doing our business during the morning, we managed to take a moment to visit the Sacred Heart Church. Beagle Bay is an Aboriginal Mission, started by the Catholic Church in the 1890s and run by them until handover to a local community council in the 1970s.  The mission history means many residents, particularly older ones, are still devout Catholics and nothing symbolises this devotion more than the Sacred Heart Church, the town's main tourist attraction, built during the First World War. From the outside it's pretty but not all that special - a whitewashed little chapel in rendered brick.  However, the inside is truly remarkable as you can see from the photos.  Whole pearl shells are inlaid into the window frames, and the altar, stations of the cross and other fittings are intricately ornamented with pearl shell fragments.  The care and effort that's gone into these, not to mention the value of the p...